Musings of a life without a car in California, well at least San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley. Full of tips, observations and impact of automobiles on our lives.
Check out the links to the right for resources and tips for reducing car usage. Get Active! Start Moving on your own energy! You can contact me at carfreeincalifornia@mac.com

Sunday, November 04, 2012

"I never wanted to be right..."

I have an incredible affection for New York City, and it crushes me to see how much misery it is going through. I was so excited that they were going to run the New York City marathon, as almost an act of defiance that life will go on, and I was crushed when they canceled it. The NYC marathon was one of my most amazing experiences of my life and I remembered the joy of completing it. I know it is the right thing to do, but I still have hope.

I am apoplectic at continued denial that we are changing our planet in unexpected ways, and that even the brightest of us are obsessed with our insignificant conveniences, and insist in a consumption drive existence that threatens our existence. That's a lot of what this blog has been about. And it gets a few visits, and I have met some fantastic people as a result. But in the end, it's crickets in how little has changed.

I was taken that even the most bold gesture as covered in the New Yorker "Talk of the Town" column covered the work of Eve Mosler who created a fascinating piece of art called "The High Water Line" where she went around New York City's borough of Brooklyn with a chalk line maker illustrating what would be the high water mark of a 100 year flood. And looking at the pictures of where she chalked and where the debris was, she was not wrong. In Mosler's own blog post titled I never wanted to be write is she rightly explained, that she did not prognosticate, she simply made visual what many have found out through the act of conducting research.

The crime is not that we ignore the warnings, it's that we are ignorant of the way the world works. I was in a conversation with someone at work and she mentioned "well won't everything be fixed by next week" and I was aghast at the incomprehension of what it takes to repair the physical world. I asked "is New Orleans all fixed from Katrina?" "Have you ever rebuilt from a house fire?" and then she seemed to realize how silly her assertion was. The digital world has created the illusion that it's possible to fix things easily. Perhaps it's that illusion that causes us to discount making any real change to our actions?